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2013 Foreword: Dead Wood and Rushing Water: Essays on Mormon Faith, Family and Culture Terryl Givens University of Richmond, [email protected]

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Recommended Citation Givens, Terryl. "Foreword." In Dead Wood and Rushing Water: Essays on Mormon Faith, Family and Culture, by Boyd J. Petersen, xi-xii. Draper, UT: Greg Kofford Books, 2013.

This Book Chapter is brought to you for free and open access by the English at UR Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in English Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of UR Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Dead Wood and Rushing Water

Dead Wood and Rushing Water

Essays on Mormon Faith, Family, and Culture

Boyd Jay Petersen

Greg Kofford Books Salt Lake City, 2013 Copyright © 2013 Boyd Jay Petersen Cover design copyright © 2013 Greg Kofford Books, Inc. Cover design by Loyd Ericson Published in the USA. All rights reserved. No part of this volume may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher, Greg Kofford Books. The views expressed herein are the responsibility of the author and do not neces- sarily represent the position of Greg Kofford Books. Greg Kofford Books P.O. Box 1362 Draper, UT 84020 www.gregkofford.com facebook.com/gkbooks

Also available in ebook.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available upon Request Contents

Acknowledgements, ix Foreword, Terryl Givens, xi

Introduction: The Afterlife ofTrees and the Roar of Rushing Water, 1

Faith

1 Yearnings of Joy, 13 2 An Acceptable Offering, 19 3 Walking through the , 31 4 Soulcraft 101: Faith, Doubt and the Process of Education, 37 5 LDS Youth in an Age of Transition, 53 6 An Imperfect Brightness of Hope, 65 7 Arriving Where I Started: Disassembling and Reassembling a Testimony, 71 8 Entertaining Angels, 83 9 In My Father’s House, 91 10 The ysteryM of the Gold Plates: The Origins of the Book of Mormon and a Life of Faith 97

Culture

11 Escape from Groundhog Day: Mormon Literary Creation and the Cycle of the Eternal Return, 111 12 The oralityM of Politics: The Challenges of Mormon Tribalism, 119 13 and Torture: Paradoxes and First Principles, 131 14 Glenn Beck, Social Justice, and the Morality of Government Intervention, 139 15 A Walk in Blue-State Moccasins: Imagining Life as a Mormon Democrat, 145 16 and the “Inmigration” of Mormon Education, 155 Family

17 The riesthood:P Men’s Last, Best Hope, 171 18 Fifteen Years Later: A Response to “The Priesthood: Men’s Last, Best Hope,” 183 19 Pink for Boys and Blue for Girls: The Trouble with Gender Roles, 193 20 What I Learned about Life, the Church, and the Cosmos from Hugh Nibley, 205 21 What I Learned from my Father, 215 22 What I Learned from my Mother, 221

Afterword: Living Water and the Wood of the Cross, 227 Foreword

Terryl L. Givens

The essay is a form particularly well suited for Mormon writers, for it blends a number of their cultural and religious imperatives. We are a confessional peo- ple, in both senses of the word. In keeping with Augustine’s principal employ- ment of the term, we are committed to the public profession of our faith. Not merely as an act of evangelizing, but among the more reflective Saints, as an articulated meditation on our yearning for the divine, and a psalmic celebration of God’s gifts. We are also confessional in the more conventional sense: journal keeping, the informality of Mormon worship, public testimony bearing, the intimacy and interdependency of ward life, all conspire to make us a people prone to self-revelation. The essay form allows a Mormon writer to do both at the same time: reveal the imprint of providential design in the vibrant though secret life along the rushing stream and in the father’s blessing of his newborn child on the one hand, and on the other, to assess one’s response to the mystery, one’s own role in those designs, one’s participation in the rhythms of life as a disciple, as a member of a family or partner in a marriage, and as a citizen in kingdoms earthly and heavenly. The essay also suits Mormons because of its emphatically democratic histo- ry. As the form’s French etymology suggests, an essay is “an attempt.” It does not trumpet the credentials of the scientist to assure its authority, nor the erudition of the historian to enforce its conclusions. It lacks the finality of the treatise, the objectivity of the journal article, and the shrill call to action of the manifesto. Of course, its egalitarian nature can be its downfall. Not all personal rumina- tions deserve a public airing; those of Boyd Petersen do. Two principle influences are evident in Boyd’s essays. From Hugh Nibley, he has absorbed an acute social conscience, and a determination to disentan- gle Mormon doctrine from Mormon culture. At the same time, like Nibley, Boyd refuses to disentangle discipleship from politics (in the broad sense of the word). Discipleship is manifest in how we live, not how we think, which is why Boyd invests so many of his essays with a call for more, not less, inte- gration of our religion into the full range of our endeavors and commitments. Like Eugene England, Boyd has found an irenic style that stands out qui- etly but sharply in these times of divisive rhetoric. In his professional work, Boyd navigates stormy waters with particular grace and wisdom. He is unfail- ingly kind, unflappable in circumstances rife with tension, reliably steady. He

Deadwood and Rushing Water | xi is a bridge builder. Boyd calls England “a member of the Radical Middle,” but the appellation equally applies to himself. He sees the best in people on each side of the debates that swirl around and among us. Those qualities translate into a marvelous writing style. The most common motif in the following essays is the almost tender breaking down of walls erected by our own dread of difference, of our own fears of fallibility, our own fiercely-held because fearfully-held assumptions. In his lovely essay on the Book of Mormon contained herein, Boyd notes that Latter-day Saints are uncomfortable living with mystery, with early Mormons especially “trying desperately” to remove it wherever they found it. Against Mormonism’s cultural rhetoric of certainty, Boyd models his own unguarded and at times risky search for understanding. “My thoughts are tentative,” he confides in a typical formulation. Boyd invites us all to ponder anew the verities we hold, sharing in his humility, tentativeness, and cheerful confidence that our paths will converge in the end.

Terryl L. Givens James A. Bostwick Professor of English University of Richmond

xii | Petersen